Status: No technical updates. Made seven hard connections tonight and a few more soft ones. My goal was three. I’m happy.

Mood: Anxious about the future, but still positive!

That’s what Dennis Mortensen, the founder of x.ai and a few other ventures that sold, told me at tonight’s New York Tech Meetup afterparty when I asked him for some advice around forming teams.

In a past life, I would’ve been scared of this. In this life, I welcome the challenge.

I went to NYTM tonight. It’s been a while since I’ve last attended one, but it’s incredible how much more useful these meetups become once you actually have a purpose (most people thought positively of Thinglistr, though they weren’t super enthusiastic about it, which slightly concerns me). I met a few people tonight, all of whom are or were doing their own thing. People LOVED my huge Zenni glasses; some even liked my multi-colored pocket square! Most people really appreciated my mockups, despite them being hand-drawn. (This gave me more motivation to really think about how this MVP should be built. This will be the first thing I’ll bring up with the guys at sea/salt tomorrow.) Networking with people at all different stages of the game was really neat. (Some, like me, were just getting started. Others rounded up some money. A few others even had a war chest. If anything, it makes me feel like I could become a member of the latter someday.)

Even though I didn’t get any soft-investments or partners, the fact that I didn’t spend a single minute idling around is a huge success in my book. I straight up walked into conversations, and it worked.

Maybe a networking event a day isn’t far from reach. I would like to have something resembling a finished product first, though.

Oh, and the business cards? I am unbelievably thankful that I had enough smarts in me to make that a priority last night. Not only did I absolutely need them tonight, but they also looked better than most of the cards I received! (At least I thought so!)